By Clint Thompson
A $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection pilot grant program will continue to help Pacific Tomato Growers be a destination workplace for H-2A workers.
“When we applied for the grant, we had an extensive list of things we were going to use it for. The H-2A program is cumbersome and challenging and involves a lot of logistics and housing,” said Jon Esformes, chief executive officer of Pacific Tomato Growers. “We’re upgrading our housing. We’re upgrading our logistics … This is going to help us support our efforts to have a best-in-class program.”
Pacific Tomato Growers, based in Palmetto, Florida, is known for being one of the largest tomato growers-packers-shippers in the country, growing tomatoes from the East Coast to the West Coast for 365 days of the year.
Workplace of Choice
The business may be more widely known, however, for how well it treats its H-2A workers. It is a simple concept employed by Esformes and his team: Treat the workers with the same dignity and respect shown to the domestic workforce. It is a reason the company continues to attract more workers than it has jobs available, Esformes said.
“Part of my job is planning ahead and seeing what challenges are coming up. Years ago, we felt strongly that labor and our relationship with labor was going to be very challenging moving forward, especially amid the political climate going on in the United States,” Esformes said. “We were fortunate that with our partnership with the Fair Food Program, going back to 2010, we were able to flip the script and do a 180 to create a workplace of choice for farmworkers.
“It’s worked very well for us with the domestic workforce that has been available. But as that workforce has been shrinking, as folks are aging out of doing agricultural work and we’ve become more reliant on the H-2A program, it has translated into a long list of people who want to come to work for us on H-2A contracts.”
Esformes participated in the USDA’s Ag Outlook Forum with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in 2023. The talk centered on farmworkers as essential workers and how supply had dwindled, especially on the heels of the COVID pandemic. It was an eye-opening and foreign experience for Esformes, who described how the H-2A program was a different process for him and his team.
“Our experience was we didn’t have enough jobs for the people that wanted to come to work for Pacific Tomato Growers. That speaks to the culture that we’ve worked very hard to create here,” Esformes said. “This grant from the USDA helps us to continue that path in supporting our domestic operations here in maintaining our position and enhancing our position as a workplace of choice for H-2A workers.”
Fair Food Program
Esformes credits his organization’s partnership with the Fair Food Program, first and foremost, that helped secure the grant funding.
“That took us to what the USDA designated as the platinum level. The Fair Food Program is such an extensive and deep program in its monitoring of farmworkers’ human rights. It’s hyper-focused on making sure that people are being treated in accordance with the law,” Esformes said. “I always get a little frustrated when people talk about their unwillingness to get involved in third-party audits. We welcome it here at Pacific. The cornerstone of the Fair Food Program is the audit process which interviews over 50% of our workers when they do an audit. If I’ve got 800 people out there, they’re going to interview over 400 of them.”
The other cornerstone of Pacific Tomatoes that helped qualify it for the grant was an emphasis on dispute resolution.
“When a complaint gets filed, it’s immediately dealt with, typically in less than 30 days, as opposed to having disputes hanging out there for months on end. Many of the disputes are settled within the first couple of days. I want the folks that work for us to feel like they’re getting an immediate response when they’ve got a concern,” Esformes said.
